How to Truly Download Your Address Book?

[username]

Hi,

I need to download my Outlook Address Book and eventually place all of the names and email addresses from it into an Excel file. I am using Microsoft Office 2010.

For starters, in Outlook, I went to Send/Receive > Send/Receive Groups > Download Address Book. This downloaded the Address Book to the following folder:
C:\Documents and Settings\Computer User\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Offline Address Books

The download generated 6 new files:
uanrdex.oab
ubrowse.oab
updndex.oab
urdndex.oab
utmplts.oab
udetails.oab

Of these 6, I found that "udetails.oab" has the information I need, as I can see a lot of emails within it (I'm not sure of the purpose of the rest of the files). However, the problem is that udetails.oab is not in an easily readable format - although I can spot some things I recognize like email addresses and names, a lot of the file is sprinkled with NULL characters and other indistinguishable junk characters (it's clearly not a plain text file).

Does anyone know a way to go about extracting all of the user details (names, emails, etc) from this udetails.oab file, or some other way to truly download my Address Book such that I can store the user information in Excel instead of just Outlook?

Any help would be very much appreciated, thanks!

[Shawn76]

Here is some info about .oab files that may help you understand what they are:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/841273

The oab file is just a snapshot of what is in your address book in Outlook. If you want to extract the information into Excel, follow the steps on this site: Please note this will only extract your contacts.


http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/ou...001096422.aspx